another half marathon

It still does strike me as somewhat odd when i felt myself thinking after sunday's race, "that wasn't that bad!"... or maybe it was when I realized I'd been running for over an hour and I wasn't even tired. of course, those things conspired together to mean my time on Sunday wasn't super fast - but just two days later I did 3 miles and could do them injury free still!

Of course, the real awesomeness of the day was that my student and athlete Albert Noyes finished with a time of 1:30! Wow! He arrived to the race site a bit late so was getting up to the line just as the gun went off, so raced hard to try to catch up to me... after about 5 miles he hadn't seen me so figured he'd passed me after all! And he had... but he kept running! he ended up placing 26th overall in a field of almost 2000 runners! this coach was very proud and hope that albert gets to recognition he deserves... just gotta keep his ego in check, his grades back up to the 3.0+ range, and ... no little alberts running around anytime soon! (sorry bad joke. albert's a great kid and i'm not worried about that really.)

Oh yeah, I got 1:59. At least I broke 2 hours :-) I'm going to run again tomorrow though and keep on trying to push myself both distance and speed wise for sure! Tomorrow probably will try to six miles if I'm still feeling ok and try to do another half marathon perhaps this coming weekend on my own and see how fast I can do it in. It's time to bust out my USAT Coach book and really put together a good plan for myself complete with goals and all that stuff... just as when I coach my students!

I was informed indirectly this weekend that fresno PAL will no longer be able to sponsor the Triathlon Club. This saddens me if it's true (hasn't been confirmed yet) but regardless, I will be creating a non-profit corporation soon in order to handle the Splash and Dash. So I've been looking a lot @ the IRS and Secretary of State websites for articles of incorporation, etc. I'll have my kids help me define purpose of the corporation as well as picking a good name... pretty exciting though too I think. Just adds to the work I'm trying to get done in the offseason. However I will be able to apply grants now too as a stand-alone 501c(3) instead of as part of PAL which will expedite the process of writing them and also reimbursement stuff because I'll have the finances under my control (as well as a Board of course!).

anyone with cool ideas for names?


teaching-wise, things are humming along in algebra II with factoring/translating quadratics. to me, more of what I remembered liking from algebra II and I think I did a good job preparing the kids for it when we spent a TON of time working with distributive property earlier in the semester as well as absolute value graphs/piecewise functions. Sorry non-math people reading this... basically what we're doing now is when you change where a graph goes.

Geometry is doing proofs and I have a cool activity for them tomorrow if I have time at lunch to finish it. if not, Friday. I'll have a sub Thursday as my small learning community, Turning Points Academy , meets.

names i'm thinking about include:
Youth Adventures
Fresno Triathlon Club
Youth Multisport

... something that demonstrates we don't just do (nor do we just want to do) triathlons/duathlons/aquathlons/races, but camping and living a healthy lifestyle is a big part of what we do too... things like community service, going to the zoo, etc... it all fits. and of course i wouldn't tell the kids, but the mentoring is the biggest focus part of it for me... it's the part that makes me committed to it all! (and often seeing their grades rise/attitudes get better simply because they've involved in something new/cool and have positive peer pressure as well as adult pressure to do their homework/study hard!)